decompressing

The knitting holiday is off to a flying start, with about five iches of the lace mohair scarf done and one finished sock sitting proudly in front of me. The scarf kept me sane on the six hour train journey, during which time I put up with a variety of crazies who were causing havoc all over the place. Thank god for knitting! NOT thank god for mohair though, which sheds more than I ever thought possible. By the end of the journey I looked like I had been attacked by a moulting yeti. Fail. On the other hand, I looked up mohair on wikipedia to find out more about it, and concluded that angora goats are pretty damn cool. After a terrible night of nightmares, I got up about half an hour ago and came to sit in the conservatory and bind off the sock. Am I the only person who loves Kitchener stitch? People seem to be forever baffled and enraged by it, but I find it wonderfully soothing. I also get a huge amount of joy from watching the toe close up before my eyes like some sort of witchcraft. It's nothing sort of amazing! On the agenda for today, then: cast on sock 2, ready for mindless stocking stitch in front of the telly later, a few more inches of the scarf and maybe finish one of the baby boots that I have been avoiding on account of the fact that I don't understand the pattern. Oh, and at some point the bff is going to teach me granny squares, which I am mega excited about, despite the fact that trying to do crochet always ends in my throwing the work, hook and all, across the room and wailing in rage. Crochet just makes too much use of the third dimension for my liking. Knitting is much flatter!

Socks

I love knitting socks. I think they may be the ultimate knitting project. They're portable.  They are a combination of mindless, happy stocking stitch for hangovers and lunch hours, and short rows which require a bit more concentration.  They are the perfect canvas for self-striping yarns and plain, luxurious ones.  Getting my point? Socks are my knitting crack and I always have one on the needles. 

However, and I cannot stress this enough: I HATE the beginning of socks.  Let's summarise what happens when I cast on a fingering-weight sock on my 2.5mm bamboo DPNs:

 1.  The stitches barely fit onto the one needle and fall off
 2. I can't count the stitches because they're too small
 3. The stitches fall off either end of the needles when I try to join the round
4. The inevitable twisted joins
5. The first inch is always like fighting with an octopus.  A very sharp octopus.

In short, I suck at starting socks.  I procrastinate (see: startitis, this blog post), I throw the thing across the room and I generally get really, really annoyed.

And yet, I continue casting the damn things on compulsively, one after another.  I must really, really love socks.

Sleigh bells ring, are you listening?

During a mad startitis binge last weekend, I spontaneously decided to make a list of all the Christmas projects I'd been vaguely planning in my head for this year, thinking I could put together a shopping list and have everything ready to start making stuff in November.  I was horrified to find that my list contained no less than 15 items, and there are only 15 weeks until Christmas day.  I'm a slow, English-style knitter, so most small-ish projects take me a week.  This news has therefore thrown me into some sort of knitting inferno where I'm trying to buy materials and knit five things at once - all whilst studying for an exam I'm taking in two weeks!  PANIC PANIC PANIC.

In my haste I have, naturally, made a mistake already.  The kiddy socks I oh-so-cleverly planned to make with some leftover yarn turned out to be rather larger than I had anticipated, and of COURSE I didn't have enough yarn.  Or anything else of the right weight.  So yesterday I found myself breaking my self-imposed yarn shopping ban to try and track down some solid coloured Regia Stretch - which of course has turned out to be like gold dust.  WTF?  The woman in Liberty's tells me they stopped selling it because nobody every bought it, which I find odd because I love the stuff!  WOE IS ME.  I ended up buying some cotton 4-ply instead which seems to do the job just fine, but still, I was already frogging the whole sock in my head, which is not a fun way to spend a lunch time yarn shopping spree, I can tell you.

It looks like I still don't have enough yarn anyway; the idea was to use the extra stuff for the heels and toe, but I am unconvinced that the leftovers will be enough to do the feet as well as the cuffs.  I really suck at this sort of thing.  Does anyone know a foolproof way of weighing yarn and deducing how much yardage you've got left, if you know all of its vital statistics?  This would really stop me from repeatedly getting into this situation ;-)

So anyway, the point is that I thought I was being all organised and avoiding having another one of those Decembers where I find myself stumbling home drunk at 1 in the morning, downing a pint of water and knitting until the sun comes up, then going to work, downing coffee, going back to the pub and repeating the cycle until I collapse; instead I find myself panic-buying yarn and trying to work out if it's humanly possible to knit whilst in the shower.  Oh well, perhaps I'll suddenly become a speed knitter as a result of all the haste, and everything will be finished by Bonfire Night!